 Good afternoon, and welcome for joining us in Community Matters here on Think Tech Hawaii. I'm Ethan Allen, filling in his host for Jay Fiddell, who cannot be here today. And with us today on Community Matters, we have a whole team of people, actually we have several teams of people from Kalani High School. We have Brian, we have Vance, and we have Carmen here. Welcome. Thank you. You're having us. Oh, hey, it's great to be here. These guys are doing exciting stuff with robotics. I think you've won competitions and you're gearing up for another competition, if I understand it. And you've got all sorts of good stuff going on. So why don't maybe one of you start telling us a little bit about the overall view of the program. About the program at first, or our program? Your program. Okay, so our program, it started in 2009 with five boys and one mentor, Mr. Silver, and he made that possible with them. And they started from the ground up. And now we're here, maybe, was it ten years, nine years? Nine years. Nine years later, and we're thriving as a team and hoping to do a lot better, a lot more later on. Great, great. So you must be dedicated as if you spent nine years cultivating the sport of robotics or the sports, I guess, of robotics. I'm dedicated because students are dedicated. If the students weren't willing to work as hard as they do in doing everything they do, I wouldn't be doing what I do. So it's cyclical. It goes around. I give to them, they give back to me, and together they've done incredible things. I can't be more proud of this team and watching it develop over the last nine years, seeing kids come from freshmen, all the way to their senior years, going to college, be graduate students in college, get into careers after college, and that we're now seeing that first group make it to that level. Excellent. Super. So Carmen, what got you interested in robotics? Well, in elementary, I was never actually introduced to robotics, so when I found out there was a robotics team at Kalani, I got interested in it and participated in it, so that way I could maybe help spread the word of steam, science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics to other elementary schools, which is an experience I never got to do. Excellent. That's great. And it's, you mentioned the first competition. Yes. Is that a spinoff of what used to be the U.S. first? Dean Cayman. Oh, it's the same thing. Yeah. Many years ago, I'd met Dean Cayman when he was just getting up and going. And so tell our audience a little bit about the first competition. So the first competition, so the main competition that we do is our big robots, about 120-pound robots, five feet tall, and that's called FRC, first robotics competition. And we have six weeks starting in January to build a robot and to compete. Our team goes to one outside regional, outside of the state, and then here in Hawaii. And if we work hard enough to win an award, we go to the World Championships, and this year it's in Houston. Uh-huh. Excellent. And so each year, as I understand it on a Mac competition, when you get your stuff in January, you get a kit of materials and you're sort of told your robot must do X, Y, and Z. You must stick a basketball into a hoop or something like that. And beyond that, you're sort of free to do what you can do with the stuff in the kit, right? Yes. And that's got to involve elaborate planning, a lot of creativity. So the first two weeks, it's a lot of catting, which is computer aided design. And we draw our robot onto the computer, or first we draw it onto paper and stuff. And then once we have the ideas that we want to implement, we put them into the computer. And then after we do that, we finish. We start cutting the parts, making it, welding it together. And then the last couple of weeks, it's finishing it up, stuff putting on the wheels, putting on all the shafts, making sure all the motors work, putting all the electric on programming, and then it gets bagged up and then it gets shipped to our first competition. Uh-huh. Yeah. Great. And do you have any of your photos or anything relate to the first competition or? There's a couple photos of us working on the robot. So this is a picture of the electrical of the robot. So that's maybe in the fifth week, that's what we work on to put on the robot. What's really cool about that shot, too, is the students designed it so it was a hatch cover. A lot of teams put the electronics underneath the robot. They get extremely difficult to get to if there's ever a problem. They were able to design it so it would come open so they'd have easy access to it. And then they could fold back up into the robot to be safe and secured for gameplay. Excellent. Yeah, very, very good. See, this is why people have to think creatively, right? Just go with the design that everyone else is going with. And so how many times have you done the first now? So have we been doing it all 10 years? 10 years, right? We've done first for nine years now. We've played in Hawaii for those last nine years. Okay. This will be our ninth time in the Hawaii regional. Hawaii regional is its 10th anniversary this year. So that's really incredible. We're proud to be excited with it to be right with the beginning. And we've gone to outside regionals. We've done six outside regionals. And we've been to worlds all eight years of our program. Congratulations. And then this year we're going back. Wow, you guys must be good at what you do then. Carmen, do you want to explain how we won the award to get there? So the award that we won was the Engineering Inspiration Award. The judges believed that through our chairman's presentation, we managed to inspire them on how engineering is a big part of our community and it can also help us in the future. Absolutely. So it's not about just building a robot. It's about building your community, your school, and affecting the students somewhere they go for their future. Yeah. That's what we were before the show talking about, right, is the many ways that automated systems now, call them robots, if you will, are helping them. They're doing more and more of the routine stuff and it's having profound effects on our communities. It's changing our whole workforce, the way people think about jobs, because many of the jobs that your parents or grandparents did, just a robot can do them faster, better, cheaper now, right? And the jobs you'll do tomorrow aren't invented yet, you know? Yep. We're hoping to invent a few of those ourselves. Excellent. Good job. I guess the beauty of this is you get more experience in the coding, in the building of these things, understanding the constraints and the powers, you'll be able to think more and better ways to get tasks done that now seem sort of impossible. I mean, maybe you can get a robot that can go along on the beach, pick up cigarette butts, you know, and get rid of all the cigarette butts that litter the beach, which is real, you know, I mean, it's not huge, but it's a big issue. People don't like it, but you can't ask a person to do that. We'd be mind-boggling, right? But a robot could do it just endlessly, right? Crawl along the beach, if it could select cigarette butts. So we're hoping to get to a future where there are going to be no cigarette butts. Well, it's just no one will want to smoke. Well, that's the ideal. So we'll start at the beginning before we have to get to the root problem with the trash. Ah, that's always better to cut the problems off before they get started. I agree entirely. So where do you guys want to, what are your dreams about taking robots to? Personally, I want to do computer hardware engineering, so that's building computers and making new computers, making them do better things. So back then when the computers were the size of a room and then they compressed it to circuit fit on a table, stuff like that. So you want to keep shrinking stuff down and getting it better and better, yeah. I want to become an architect when I grow up. And if there were robots in the future, it could maybe help with planning, making blueprints better and checking like the foundation. So maybe we show the video at this point. Yeah. So maybe I can explain a little bit about the video. So the video is a is a summary of the year. It qualifies us for the Chairman's Award, which we unfortunately didn't win in South Carolina, but we hope to win in Hawaii. So it explains what we did this past year and what we did throughout our whole history of the team. Cool. Team Magma strives to involve the community in science, technology, engineering, arts and math, also known as STEAM, through hosted tournaments, demonstrations and outreach events. Our team members and alumni have volunteered at FLL tournaments as judges, emcees and scorers. Our team also ran an innovation fair at FLL State Tournament, including math, science and life size board games to spark interest in STEAM. This year, we have done eight robot demos, exposing over 500 people to STEAM. At Robot Demos, we bring robots to various places such as schools and community centers. We demonstrate what we build and let everyone from our community learn about our program. We do this to hopefully inspire the next generation to engage in STEAM. This past year, we have held eight week long camps, totaling over 100 students from grades kindergarten to eighth grade. This is our second year of running the GTEC program, and we have obtained two grants worth $5,000 total for the two upcoming programs this summer, providing more than 20 hours of programming to 32 elementary and middle school students. We send out our bristlebots all around the world to help inspire the next generation. Over the past eight years, we've inspired over 10,000 individuals and 20 different schools. Many of those individuals have gone on to join robotics teams, just like ours. This year, we have taught six classes over three weeks, teaching 20 to 30 kids per class in military bases on the island of Oahu. These classes are offered at a discounted price to allow military children to have opportunities in STEAM education. The Mobile Maker Space is our initiative to spread and inspire students to become involved in STEAM. This mobile space is fully equipped with 3D printers, laser engravers and more. The idea for this is to take it anywhere on the island, giving access to tools and knowledge to FRC teams and aspiring makers alike. This year, we held four week long classes, teaching numerous middle school students the many applications of STEAM. Our products are student designed and made using a laser engraver and CNCs. These products introduce the public to applications of laser cutters and bring attention to the diversity and impact that robotics makes on the students. Dear Mr. Silber and Team Magma, thank you for coming to Kahala Elementary to show us your robotics team. When you guys presented your robots in the first 30 seconds, I was already amazed. When I go to Kalani High School, I'm totally going to join Team Magma. Sincerely, James. My time on the robotics team has taught me what I want to do in my life and I discovered my passion in mechanical engineering. My favorite part about being a mentor is getting to work with students, showing them the opportunities for them to be successful, watching them struggle and then figuring out in that aha moment of, I got it, I made it, it worked. That's the cool part about being a mentor. That was that was amazing. You guys do great stuff. You take this program into schools, like elementary schools, like you were saying earlier. So we do this through our academies. For example, we have our Makers Academy, which involves the make mobile. The great thing about the make mobile is that it's off the grid so we could take it anywhere on the island and give students and teachers an opportunity to get an experience with steam machinery. Excellent, excellent, super. And I thought you wanted something a little more of the Chairman's video. Yes, so the Chairman's Award is an award that is given out to a team that embodies an example other teams can follow. It's the most prestigious award in first. And that's that video. I can see why that generated that for you guys because you're clearly doing good stuff on your own, but then you're also sharing it out widely and inspiring others to follow in your tracks and surpass you even, right? Oh yeah, Mark of any great teachers and other students surpass themselves. That's right, that's right. You just help a little support, get some barriers out of the way and let them go, right? Yeah. So we are going to take a quick break here and we're a team, the team from Brian, Vance and Carmen from Kalani High School Robotics Team have been here and we're going to take a break and be back with some new guests. Hi, I'm Cheryl Crozier Garcia, the host of Working Together on ThinkTek Hawaiʻi. Join us every other Tuesday from 4 p.m. to 4.30 when we discuss the impact of change on employees, employers and the economy. Aloha, my name is Reg Baker and I'm the host of Business in Hawaiʻi with Reg Baker. We broadcast live every Thursday at 2 o'clock. We highlight businesses and individuals that are successful in Hawaiʻi and we learn their secrets to their success. I hope you can join us and listen in because we always have a pack of information on successful stories in Hawaiʻi. Aloha. Aloha, how you doing there Latties and Laddies? This is Angus McTeky and I'm ThinkTek Hawaiʻi and I have my favorite show. Hibachi Talk with my good old buddies Gordo, the Texana and Andrew, the security guy. Please join us every Monday. No, it's Friday, every Friday from 1 p.m. to 1.30 p.m. here on ThinkTek Hawaiʻi and you can also find us on YouTube. Hibachi Talk. Aloha. Heel sisters here with a healthy tip. We encourage you to enjoy the food you eat this holiday season and keep it local and healthy. Yeah, eat the rainbow, eat the rainbow and if you need any produce come to the red barn on the north shore. Aloha everybody. My name is Mark Shklav. I'd like you to join me for my program Law Across the Sea on ThinkTekHawaii.com. Aloha. Looking to energize your Friday afternoon? Tune in to Stand the Energy Man at 12 noon. Aloha Friday here on ThinkTek Hawaiʻi. And they're back here at Community Matters on ThinkTek Hawaiʻi. I'm Ethan Allen filling in for Jay Fidel and with me today is a team from Kalani High Schools. Brian was here earlier and we have two new students and I'm sorry I didn't get your names. Hi, I'm Noah Eckfield. Noah. I'm Roby Porter. Roby. Glad you both were able to join us here. And so we were talking before about some of the amazing things that your team has done the first competition and all that kind of good stuff. But I gather you know other aspects of the program, right? Yeah, I am actually our treasure for our team. So I do look kind of more at the business side of things. Very important to know. Very important to know you can't run businesses without treasure, right? So how do you, well that's a good question though. How do you, I mean these are not cheap things to do. The robots themselves cost money. If you're trying to go off to these competitions, you have to pay for transportation. How do you organize all that? So basically you spend about $80,000 a year, which is a large sum of money. A lot of it does go for trips and a lot of materials for our, I guess, to build our robots and things like that. So every year we start off with a budget saying what we're going to do for, I guess, how it's the money's going to be split up with the money we gained from last year, how much we're projected from our three businesses. We actually have, like Carmen said earlier, we have Kalani Robotics Academy, which is a major fundraiser for us. We have Bristol Bus. What is the academy? This is a kindergarten to eighth grade academy that it's a week long, normally over the summer or fall breaks. So you guys work with kids then from K-8 basically? Yeah. Okay, cool. We teach them the instructors and they run four different camps simultaneously during that week. The schools then pay you guys to do this. So this is, you raise some funds that way. Cool, excellent. Oh yeah. Oh, sorry. Some other businesses that we've created over the years is one that we're really proud of, which is a Bristlebots LLC, which is a small micro robot, which started off with us cutting off the heads of toothbrushes and strapping cell phone vibrators to those. But we've since then reached out to different companies in China so that we can manufacture our very own parts. And we're currently in the sixth generation where they're able to be more widely used to a wider age range. We usually aim for it to be in elementary school and we're hoping to be able to reach it out further. And so these Bristlebots for our viewers may not know. What do they do? So basically what they do is there's bristles on the bottom, like a bristlebot, and then it has a cell phone vibrator on it so that as the cell phone vibrator spins, the bristles kind of vibrate and then it moves around on its own. We use them to go to elementary schools and hold demonstrations there where those kids get a very good initial stepping point to get interested in science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics. I myself was one that was captivated by these little robots. And I just kept going and I was like, I got to do this. It's so fun. And now I'm here on the robotics team that inspired me in the first place. Excellent, excellent. Eight years ago, we developed this product, and Noah was in one of the schools. We had several of our other students that are now team members that were participants in the parent and student nights. Wonderful. What was really cool about it is the kids used their stuff they learned in school, the cadding and engineering class. They used the cadding to actually develop everything about it. So all the artwork here is all CAD. This is shipped into one manufacturer to produce the bag, another manufacturer gets the toothbrush, and what that's going to look like, how wide, how long it's going to be, everything is cadded out. So just like any other manufacturing process that would be done in a normal corporation, these high school students are doing it. Right. And you have to figure out how to coordinate all that and get the right parts together and the right numbers. Yeah. And then you have the assemblies and sending it out from here. Yeah, excellent, excellent. And then you've got another product here too. Yeah, actually, this is one of our newer ones. We call it magma crafts. We're lucky enough to have a laser printer, which we were able to utilize with different programs. And we actually designed this. And as you see, this one is our B. We, um... Connect. Yes, it's two-sided. So we originally just had the pieces out by itself, but then we realized with this, it just has a cleaner look, as well as it's just easier to put together. Sure, sure. And I see it. Well, so those come apart and you build puzzles? Yeah, you can build it. This is actually the picture of what it looked like. Cool, excellent, excellent. Very neat, very neat. So, and then again, you're selling these and raising money for your hub. Yeah, wow, this is, this really is, I mean, it is a business. It is. And that's great. That's, this is really, you're really preparing yourselves. And it's more than just, you know, turn to page 45 in your textbook and do the list of problems, right? Which is how unfortunate too much of school is taught, right? Yeah. This is much more real world stuff. It's like, oh, we've been spending a little too much on this. Now we're going to get the funds to go off on our next first competition, right? Yeah. I think my favorite thing about being on the robotics team is being able to use what I've learned in school. Instead of just having it as like useless knowledge that like, oh, I learned how to do geometry. I learned how to find all three sides of a triangle. I actually get to like use that and use those equations and put it into effect and figure out the answers to the problems that they give us. Sure. Yeah, exactly. How do you make X number of products using the least amount of material? How do you cut it? Yeah. You know, it's a classic geometry problem, right? Yeah, exactly. And then, of course, the whole business aspect. Who can produce that for you? At what cost? At what time frame? You know, how reliably, right? And you begin to learn all about sort of statistics and probability in terms of what kinds of tolerances you need because your laser cutter has to cut within very, you know, very limited. Yeah. Wonderful, wonderful. And so when is your next competition coming up? Our next competition is coming up from March 31st to April 1st at the Stan Sheriff Center. It's the 10th annual Hawaii regional, as we've said before, and it's showcasing the First Robotics 2017 competition game, First Steamworks. And what that is is it's like a, it's a steampunk theme game where we, there's an airship on the field and there are actual people inside the airship for the first time ever in any First Robotics competition. And the robots have to deliver these gears that are about 12 inches wide in their circular like gears. And the robots deliver them to a peg which the pilot inside the airship then pulls up and then grabs the gear and sticks it on a stick where they rotate it to spin rotors to get the airship prepared for flight. It's really hard to put into words kind of how complicated it is. Oh, I can see a lot of moving hearts as it were, you know? Yeah, that's great because So we're really hoping a lot of people come out to the Stan Sheriff in order to witness and watch this. Saturday is going to be a great day when we're going to see a lot of the game action. It should be a lot of fun because if multiple robots are trying to get this peg at the same time you have to be able to either cooperate or compete for it, right? First Robotics is all about teamwork and being able to work with the, with brand new people. It's like you are set in an alliance with two other teams. You may not know anyone on the other team. You get to know each other pretty quickly to discuss strategy, discuss what you're going to do and how you're going to do it. Oh, I see. So it's got both elements of cooperation and that's great designing on their part. That's very exciting. So what are your chances? Well, I personally have been watching a lot of the live streams of the competitions leading up to the one we're going to be at and we went to a first week competition. So we were kind of the testing phase where they initiated a lot of new stuff and I'm thinking that we have a pretty good chance because we have two things that can do the things it's supposed to very efficiently and quickly. So what we're aiming to do is climb up a rope. So it's just a free suspended rope and our robot has to grab onto it and climb up it in the last 30 seconds of a match and we can do that in about six seconds from bottom to top. Oh, wow. I should have to get your robot against my little cockatoos. They eat your robots. Well, this is great. This is great. I mean, again, I can see it involves all these different aspects of learning and thinking about design work, thinking about mathematics underlying materials, points of view, physics, fiscal science, right? Yeah. As well as the soft skills of learning to work as a team and cooperating, breaking up your tasks into the subcategories and all that you need to do. So again, this is great preparation for the sort of the world of work. What you have to do in work is you're working with people. You're sort of competing with other people, but you've got to know when you can sit down. You've got to be able to rely on your partners and friends to do their part of the business because your part may depend on theirs or vice versa. And yeah, excellent. And, you know, gets into art, which I like. That's the other thing that Steve, of course. Yeah. It used to be just STEM, science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and then we add the art in because we think it's good for them to be able to express creativity through their engineering and not just, oh, build a box. No, you build a box and it's all pretty. All right. It's got lights on it. It's got wings. Exactly. Crazy. And you're also learning the social sciences. Could be steams. Yeah, there you go. Next up. All the afternoons drive you crazy in education these days. All right. Well, this is super. So real quick before we wrap up, what advice do you have for younger students coming in who might want to get excited or get involved in this? I feel like just for younger students, just be open to doing whatever because coming in, I had no clue what I was going to be doing on this team. I didn't know much about anything, but just being open to willing to try, you can learn a lot, I think. Good. The kind of words I live by is you miss 100% of the shots you don't take. So I myself, I've been all over the place doing like PR stuff, doing electrical stuff, mechanical stuff, and design stuff, and just trying new things and seeing what you want to do. It's something that I can really encourage because you're never going to know unless you try. Yeah, yeah. And just like failure is just like a part of life. Yeah. If you fail things and then you do more and you learn from your failure and you go on and do something a little better, you know? The people that just succeed all the time don't really have that feeling of, ah, dang it, but I got to do this better. Right, no, I mean I'd be very resilient. Resilience is a key capacity in a standard age. Hey, it's been a wonderful to have you guys here. This has been a very exciting show. So when's the competition and where? March 31st, April 1st at the Stan Sheriff. Okay. It's free to enter, no cost there. Parking is still UH, so you got to pay the UH guys. Nine o'clock to four o'clock basically will be the time frame that the robots will be in action. We recommend that people wear closed-toed shoes and you can go around and walk the pit area where all the teams are. We'll have 37 teams here in Hawaii, from Australia, Taiwan, China, Japan, from the mainland U.S., and then our local teams here, Wahu, Big Island, Molokai, Maui, Kauai, we'll all be represented out there. So it's really awesome to see all this international teams get together and play. Cool, we should have to see if I can get Jay to send a big tech crew out. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it's amazing. Anybody should come, say just stop by, say hi, you know, whatever. All right. Hey, well thank you all. This was great fun. This wraps it up for Community Matters here. I'm your host Ethan Allen, aloha.